terary man or a preacher. The other arts have their
obvious limitations. The literary man does not dare to demand of the
musician that he shall be scientific or moral. The latter is safe
in uttering every kind of profanity in sound so long as it is music.
Musicians have their art to themselves. But the artist is tormented, and
asked to reflect the thought of his time. Beauty is primarily what he
is concerned with; and the only moral ideas which he can impart in a
satisfactory way are the moral ideas naturally associated with beauty in
its higher or lower forms. But I think, some of you are confuting me in
your own minds at this moment. You say to yourselves: "But we have all
about us the works of great artists whose inspiration not one will deny.
He used his art to express great ethical ideas. He spoke again and again
about these ideas. He was proud that his art was dedicated to their
expression." I am sorry to say that he did say many things which would
have endeared him to Tolstoi and Ruskin, and for which I respect him
as a man, and which as an artist I deplore. I deplore his speaking of
ethical ideas as the inspiration of his art, because I think they were
only the inspiration of his life; and where he is weakest in his appeal
as an artist is where he summons consciously to his aid ethical ideas
which find their proper expression in religion or literature or life.

Watts wished to ennoble art by summoning to its aid the highest
conceptions of literature; but in doing so he seems to me to imply that
art needed such conceptions for its justification, that the pure artist
mind, careless of these ideas, and only careful to make for itself
a beautiful vision of things, was in a lower plane, and had a less
spiritual message. Now that I deny. I deny absolutely that art needs to
call to its aid, in order to justify or ennoble it, any abstract ideas
about love or justice or mercy.

It may express none of these ideas, and yet express truths of its own
as high and as essential to the being of man; and it is in spite of
himself, in spite of his theories, that the work of Watts will have
an enduring place in the history of art. You will ask then, "Can art
express no moral ideas? Is it unmoral?" In the definite and restricted
sense in which the words "ethical" and "moral" are generally used, art
is, and must by its nature be unmoral. I do not mean "immoral," and let
no one represent me as saying art must be immoral by its very na